


Sozhaleniya

by viklikesfic (v_angelique)



Category: Real Person Fiction
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-23
Updated: 2010-10-23
Packaged: 2017-10-20 08:25:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 543
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/v_angelique/pseuds/viklikesfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thank you to the incomparable <a href="http://amadi.dreamwidth.org/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://amadi.dreamwidth.org/"><b>amadi</b></a> as always for support, encouragement, and research assistance.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Sozhaleniya

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to the incomparable [](http://amadi.dreamwidth.org/profile)[**amadi**](http://amadi.dreamwidth.org/) as always for support, encouragement, and research assistance.

"Hey Anton," a friend asks at a party cum jam session, late one night. "Do you know Regina?"

He doesn't, but before he can extend his hand, she catches him with her stare, extended and intense. She looks at him a long time, and then her mouth quirks into a smile.

"Do you like popsicles, Anton?" she asks.

He finds himself, improbably, captivated.

~*~

He meets her grandmother in a nursing home that smells like fish. He is wearing a thick, charcoal sweater, knitted by his own grandmother, and when she touches his cheeks and calls him " _dorogoi_ ," he can feel the soft, crinkly brown paper that _babushka_ wraps gifts in, read in his mind's eye the customs slip from St. Petersburg. She dies in October, and he holds Regina's hand until the last possible moment as they walk towards the funeral home. She wears a short black dress with her hair tied back, no modest veil to hide her tears.

~*~

He fucks her over a pool table, and she scratches his back with long, blood red fingernails. They call each other _genii_ , and he never knows whether to lean on the truth or the irony. He teaches her to play chess. He tells her about Bruce and John and how he misses... everything. She strokes his hair and tells him that in springtime, the sun washes away the regrets that have built up in the snowdrifts. When she goes on tour, he sends her a single camellia.

~*~

She drinks chamomile tea spiked with vodka. Sometimes, her eyes are incredibly old. He wonders what she sees through them, how his own face is scarred by time. He wonders how much outside reflects in. Sometimes, he lets his mind go quiet, consciously, his head on her breast and her hand brushing through the soft tendrils of his curls. They plan to go to Vladivostok, one day. They want to cross the border into China. It's easier to dream than not to. It's easier to kiss her breast and feel his cock rise in his trousers than it is to confront inevitability.

~*~

To break the fast, he makes _pelmeni_ , and she laughs at his choice of dish even as she eats the steaming dumpling from his hand, cottage cheese dripping onto her lower lip. He kisses her scalded mouth, encircles her waist with his arm, holds her as long as she consents to be held. He finds her pussy with his fingers and breaks a fast of another kind, their bodies pressed against the warm stove, the weak kitchen lamp softening her smile.

~*~

He's five years older when he sees her at a party. She's wearing yellow. He lifts her hand, kisses her knuckles, massages the center of her palm unobserved with the tip of his index finger. He is perfectly debonair. She is perfectly beautiful. Together, they were never perfect. They were chaos.

He stands on a roof and smokes a cigarette and New York in January chills his bones but he doesn't wear anything on top of his thick, charcoal sweater. The hem is unraveling. She wraps her arms around his waist and rests her forehead at the nape of his neck. He closes his eyes.

Above, masked by city lights, a shooting star.


End file.
